We would like to invite you to an online workshop with Jason Read on his recently published book The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the Politics of Work (Verso, 2024). The goal of the workshop is to bring together scholars, students and activists from different backgrounds in order to delve deeper into the philosophy and politics of work. We aim for a moderately sized group where we can freely discuss philosophical and political problems in an inclusive and comradely setting. Below you will find practical information on the workshop itself, accompanied by an opening statement that outlines the stakes of the discussion.
Kind regards,
Thomas van Binsbergen (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) and Lorenzo Buti (KU Leuven)
BOOK WORKSHOP
The Critique of Work with Jason Read
Date: June 5 at 3 pm (Brussels, CEST) or 9 am (Portland, Maine)
Duration: 3 hours
Venue: Microsoft Teams (link will be provided)
Info and registration: Thomas.van.Binsbergen@vub.be
Discussants:
- Tatiana Llaguno (University of Groningen)
- Juan Domingo Sánchez (Université Libre de Bruxelles)
- Christiaan Boonen (Tilburg University)
Opening Statement
Capitalism centers life around work. As non-capitalist forms of life are all but eradicated in advanced capitalist countries and the remaining institutional counterweights have been hollowed out, people are delivered over to the labor market for basic subsistence. To ‘earn a living’ is an economic necessity under these conditions, even as the class of working poor continues to grow. Yet even within ‘absolute capitalism’, it would be a mistake for a critical theory of work to analyze wage labor only as an economic compulsion. As Jason Read argues, this would disregard how work shapes subjectivity: our desires, motivations, fears and frustrations, our sense of self and relation to others and the world. The economic does not function at a distance from subjectivity and ideology. Rather, ideology is immediately present in the economic, and the mental in the material. As the material coordinates of work shape our subjectivity, the latter also produces its effects on the economic by determining how we relate to it. As soon as we pretend to find a stable zone of analysis (the objective economy, autonomous subjectivity), we are confronted with its other scene, which never ceases to interrupt it.
In The Double Shift, Read sets out Spinoza and Marx as philosophical references for a critical theory of work. Marx argues that the human essence is nothing else than the ensemble of social relations. Under social conditions where wage labor has become dominant, people are shaped by the dynamic interplay between abstract and concrete labor. The ever-churning machine of capitalism, which submits concrete labors to the measuring stick of abstract labor, creates an overdetermined grid of heterogeneous ethics and alienations. From the ‘rise and grind’-mentality which glorifies work in its abstract form to the alienation of concrete work which cannot keep up with the dictates of the market: concrete and abstract labor are subjective as well as economic notions. Insofar as they ideologically shape how we relate to the experience of work under capitalism, they can also express alternative imaginaries of work, some of which even reinforce the capitalist mode of production.
In a different but compatible way, Spinoza enables us to formulate the ‘affective composition of labor’. A fear of losing one’s job, a joyful identification with the compulsion of working or the small pleasures that make drudgery bearable, people relate affectively to their socio-economic conditions. From a Spinozist perspective, work functions as an ‘infra-ideology’, bringing human existence and desire in line with the practical demands of wage labor. Our affective strivings are formatted to the capitalist reality and a mass culture of individualism. Caught between the fears and hopes of the contemporary work experience, workers are further isolated and subjugated to the capitalist mode of production. An intersectional approach may show the different paths and even the exceptions to the dominant mix of affects, but the system will always find ways to confront people with their dependence on the market, turning the situation to its advantage. This is why the analysis needs to step up its game and activate the material in the mental: the stuff below ideology is also political. The politics of work incorporates the critique of political economy in terms of the affective determinations of work today, when we see the better but do the worse.
In capitalism, the economy is political insofar as it organizes and stabilizes social relations. It even performs a classically hegemonic role when it is able to divert the fears and frustrations surrounding work towards ends that reinforce the status quo. Such is the case with ‘negative solidarity’, where others that seemingly benefit from the system (in terms of stable jobs, social security or ‘government hand-outs’) become a source of resentment and jealousy of others who toil with little material benefit. Such resentful attitudes by no means restrict themselves to the economic sphere, as they spill over into racialized and sexualized fantasies of groups that supposedly keep honest workers from their jouissance.
Yet mapping the subjective landscape of work also provides the tools to identify how popular frustrations with work could be turned into a real political contestation. A critical theory of work identifies the heterogeneous subjective determinations on which politics can intervene. Without such political intervention, one risks remaining in an amorphous state of a multitude that indeterminately sways from one way to the other. Which political strategy does this subjective map suggest? Does it encourage an anti-work politics and a return to Paul Lafargue’s ‘right to be lazy’? Or does it rather politicize concrete experiences of exploitation in order to revitalize the figure of the worker in the 21st century, in times of soaring imperialism? Such are the questions opened up by Read’s critical theory of work. As Deleuze once wrote, “there is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.”